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Author: Matthew Kelleher

Matthew has 8 years of experience in email and online marketing. Originally launching Claritas Interactive and helping to develop this across Claritas Europe, he was a member of the original Email Marketing Association (eMMA) and a founder member of the DMA Email Marketing Council. He is currently Commercial Director at behavioural marketing and analysis group RedEye.

Everyone is doing basket abandonment emails today… or so I thought. But I have just been proved wrong.

According to our research, less than 10% of the top 100 UK e-commerce sites (as defined by Hitwise) currently do basket abandonment emails, so I thought I would post the top 10 best practice learnings that we have had from the last decade...

Bulk email is dead. OK, some people might still be doing it, but does that mean it works as well as it could? Just look in your own junk folder to find the many emails you have opted into but no longer reach your inbox.

So why is bulk email on the way out? Well, let’s consider what the top three email ISPs have to say...

It is important, I think, to define what is going on and what is out there in the market regarding trigger email marketing, behavioural email and remarketing, phrases thrown around and often confused but which have key differences.

I want to hazard some definitions of these terms, and of course I am open to having these challenged...

In a recent post I asked a question about behavioural email and segmentation that received a number of positive responses but which showed a breadth of approach across the market, from the pragmatic to the fully integrated.

But I was only left with one question that has nagged at me for a couple of weeks, so I thought I would give it an airing: if behavioural email and segmentation is the way the market is going, then is everyone who is building an ‘offline’ RFM (recency, freqency, monetary) database / segmentation tool to drive email wasting their time and money?

Twitter has just drawn my attention to a piece of advice on basket abandonment that I personally feel is misleading. The idea that 24 hours later is industry best practice for sending a basket abandonment emails is something I have never before come across.

Am I right in seeing behavioural email and segmentation as the future for targeting customers online?

I cannot escape the feeling that behavioural is something of a panacea for the current issues facing email marketers, while also taking direct marketing another step towards individual level, one to one marketing.

“We are not ambulance chasers, people leave our stores empty handed every day and we don’t feel the need to beg them to come back so why should online be any different?”

If anyone takes the time to read these words, I would love your feedback. RedEye has a series of clients that make a hell of a lot of money and ROI from behaviourally targeted and automated emails.

But we were blown away recently when a prospect said that they would never do trigger emails or basket abandonment work because they perceived it as the e-marketing equivalent of ‘ambulance chasing’!? Ouch!!